Season's greetings, stardust-hounds. Who wants another one of those desperately called-for reviews of the decade? Exactly. Which is why we're doing Cowell again.

By now, you will have realised that a story containing the words "Simon Cowell" and "global expansion" is like the bat signal to Lost in Showbiz, and there will be those among you who judge the call best ignored. But how, in all conscience, can it be ignored? How, when his armies of darkness are on the march, co-opting teenage power balladeers to work for scale or nothing in exchange for lucrative prime-time exposure – a nakedly exploitative business model that has somehow yet to attract the attentions of the UN Commissioner for Karaoke Rights?

While you are considering your answer, let us proceed to the latest issue of GQ, which carries an interview with Cowell and his new business partner Philip Green – the least troubling double act since Ernst Stavro Blofeld invited a white persian cat on to his lap.

Simon and Philip's SPECTRE is as yet unnamed, though the gossamer-touched Sir Phil likes "Growl". But as you might have heard, the company will apparently seek to control the rights to all Cowell's existing shows, develop all new global formats he dreams up, and monetise said properties via a blitzkrieg of rapacious merchandising deals that will make the likes of Coca-Cola and Manchester United look like babes in the wood. The aim, it seems, is to make Cowell "richer than Oprah", and, rather naively, some have already called it "the new Disney".

And so to the ersatz Mouse. Later in the interview, Cowell will name his heroes – "Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch" – but we begin in medias res, as it were, joining him and Green at a restaurant dinner that has just been interrupted by a text message from a journalist asking if the pair are buying ITV.

"We could do it," cackles Philip. "That's the difference," explains Simon to the interviewer. "A year ago I think I would have been interested, just out of ego. Now I sit with him and not only could we do it, we could make a massive difference."

There follows the first reference to what Cowell calls "our capability", and I really do think it would be helpful in the long run if you started thinking of them as an independent nuclear state. As for the decision to team up, Green explains that they are, in effect, in the same business. "We both understand the consumer. We know what the public wants."

Which is The X Factor. In Vegas. In a permanent venue rumoured to be Caesar's Palace. "The home of the X Factor – live from Las Vegas!" enthuses Green. "We'll have a store. And it'll all be online. You have 20, 30, 40 million people tuning in twice a week. You bring two or three hundred million viewers to a venue – off we go! It's taking it up a peg. The rest of the world is Part Two."

Apocalypse permitting.

"Philip has showbusiness in his blood," explains Cowell. "He reminds me of one of those guys from the 30s. Louis Mayer . . ."

Aha! Finally, the first reference to Mayer, suggesting something Lost in Showbiz has long suspected – that Cowell sees himself as a modern-day Irving Thalberg. There simply isn't the space to detail the yawning chasm between MGM's fabled boy genius and his bogbrush-haired early-21st-century simulacrum – but suffice to say it spans everything from artistic sensibility and a desire to elevate the public taste, not debase it, to the possession of more than one trick (albeit a monstrously successful one). So imagine it as the difference between Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel delivering the line "I want to be alone", and Lloyd Daniels butchering Take That's A Million Love Songs.

Still, this is not the sort of contrast to trouble Cowell. The only glimpse of regret is a faintly repulsive lament for money not made in the past, former properties not fully exploited, and comes when the interviewer asks if there will be an X Factor computer game.

"We should have had 20 games," is Cowell's rueful reply, conjuring images of a series we might call Grand Theft Culture. "What about theme parks?" inquires the interviewer.

Please not. Please not the theme parks.

"I think the answer is 'yes'," says Green.

Yes, indeed. And yet, how fitting, given the whole thing already feels like a ride you can't get off. Just as that former X Factor contestant whose dad had just died was told by the show's producers to sing Dance With My Father Again, so the entire Cowell enterprise must become a sledgehammer allegory of itself.

As for our antihero, we are once again reminded of his reply when Rolling Stone asked him what he wanted most in the world. "Money," said Cowell. "As much money as I can get my hands on."

Mmm. That and a little wooden sled – metaphor as yet unsolved. But I'm working on it.